Practice 4: Improve

Table of contents

Overview

In the process of finishing a KCS article (once the resolution is known), we apply our best judgment about what information to include in the article. We will often capture information that has no relevance to the issue based on understanding the resolution, and we should be sure to remove information (particularly in the environment statements) that ends up being irrelevant, misleading, inaccurate, or inappropriate to the audience. We want to capture relevant, accurate statements using our preferred vocabulary in the environment field. We want as much consistency in how we describe the environment as possible. And, we want as much diversity in the issue statements as requestors use to describe the issue.

Once again: the issue or symptom statements in the article need to reflect the requestor's experience; technical accuracy is not required. When we improve existing articles, we want to add to the issue statements - not rewrite, edit or delete the ones that are already part of the article. We have to assume that, no matter how incorrect or ridiculous they may appear to us, the statements represent the requestor's part of the article and reflect how they perceived the issue. This is what makes the articles findable by others who are likely to have a similar perception of the issue.

Techniques

Comment added by Russ Brooks: I wonder if removing irrelevant content is always the best approach. I think it can be useful to a customer to know that some things that they thought were relevant, aren't actually relevant. It helps reduce the number of variables they need to worry about in relation to the situation. For example - Box A does interwork with Box B, but for this problem Box B has no effect, so don't worry about having to upgrade or restart Box B when you apply the fix to Box A. (Customer's thought: That's good to know because I thought I would have to coordinate something with Box B, and that's managed by another group, and its difficult to coordinate with them - injects a lot of delay into process. Now I know I'll be able to move ahead per my own schedule